Harden's Restaurant Guide 2011: £5.99 (iPhone, iPad)

Harden's app screenshot.

Harden's website is a nightmare on the iPhone, and this app at last renders all that information portable. It's a slick and comprehensive piece of software – as you'd expect from the price – covering 2,500 restaurants in the guides' familiar snappy fashion.

You can browse maps, search by county, postcode or tube stop, find suggestions under "best for romance" and the like, and get regular news updates from the brothers. Most useful.

Offline access: Yes

4/5

Toptable Restaurant Finder: Free (iPhone, Android)

Fair. The "Restaurants nearby" function works as well as any other app's, and there are handy features such as a wine pairings guide, a tip calculator and a list of special offers.

Contributed as they often are by anonymous spleen-venters, not every Toptable review is particularly reliable. But this still represents a handy way of finding nearby restaurants, and it's free.

Offline access: Limited

3/5

The Good Pub Guide: £3.99 (iPhone)

Better than the Good Food Guide, though some users claim it has a tendency to crash. It lists over 20,000 pubs and offers full reviews for around 2,000 of those. Handy if you fancy a pint at short notice in an unfamiliar neighbourhood.

Offline access: Yes

3/5

AA Restaurant Guide 2011 (free on iPhone; £1.79 on iPad)

AA Restaurant Guide 2011 app screenshot

Slight Pritt Stick and cardboard feel here, as you might expect from a free app, and searching could be easier. But the AA has reviews for more than 1,000 UK restaurants and includes phone numbers, addresses and websites.

Considering that it doesn't cost anything, any restaurant-lover with an iPhone would be mad not to get this.

Offline access: Yes

3/5

Foodspotting Lite: Free (Android, iPhone)

This is a very good idea: Foodspotting finds your location and shows you photographs of dishes from nearby restaurants. You scroll through them: when you see something you like, you can click it and read about the restaurant.

Coverage can be patchy but that should improve as more people download the app. A novel way of choosing what to eat.

Offline access: No

3/5

Europe - The Michelin Guide Restaurants 2011: £11.49 (iPhone)

Michelin app screenshot.

Dazzlingly expensive, this, but if you're a Michelin fan you'll note the app is considerably cheaper than buying guides for the individual countries (the UK-only version is £5.99).

Smartly designed, this offers the same scant (and to my mind, not especially reliable) information you get in print. You have to use Michelin's own maps, of course, which are nowhere near as nice as Google's. Frankly, everything you need to know about the old tyre-maker's bias is revealed by one fact: when you search by location, the default is always France.

Offline access: Yes

2/5

Zagat for Android: £6.16

(Zagat To Go available on iPhone and iPad, £5.99)

A plain and rather pedestrian app whose most useful feature is itsinternationalism. Zagat claims to offer 30,000 reviews of restaurantsaround the world, so this might be handy if you travel a lot. But theapp's breadth is also its downfall. Special features (business lunch,formal tea, open late and so on) are haphazard: London has apparentlyjust five BYO restaurants of note, one of them an overrated fish andchip shop. Nor does the lack of pictures make this a pleasant browse.

Offline access: No

2/5

Good Food Guide 2011: £4.99 (iPhone, iPad)

Good Food Guide app screenshot

This was a mess until recently, when the developers released an update removing countless formatting errors and fixing the Gordian map function. But the GFG is still is the worst of the main restaurant apps. It doesn't feel like you're getting much content for a fiver and though some users may find a list of 60 top restaurants useful, such information is probably Googlable.

Worst, each review is an attempt to use as many clichés as possible. My local gastropub is "the real deal" and "in full flow", and although its puddings can "let the side down" its "revved up" chef is serving (oh, Lord) "remarkable British victuals".